


girls who light fires

by napoleons



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, also fluff??, road trip au i am so sorry, yuck - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 07:12:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5699617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napoleons/pseuds/napoleons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>in the summer before college starts in the fall, finn and rey take a roadtrip to pick poe up from space camp in alabama.<br/> <br/><i>The two of them have fallen into the easy, comfortable silence that comes after spending three weeks in close proximity. They’d showered under waterfalls together, shrieked at the temperature of the spray and pushed each other off the rocks into the pool below where it was even colder, smelling of pond water and cheap, fruity shampoo. They’d started out on the Pacific Ocean, streaked with salt, their eyes stinging, their skin cracking. Back when they’d been soft, inexperienced. Used to eating pancakes one of the mom’s had made, fighting over maple syrup, who got to drink the last of the orange juice.</i></p><p>  <i>Now they ate gas station hot dogs slathered in ketchup when they were lucky, or otherwise existed solely on stale chips and beef jerky on long stretches of endless sweltering tarmac, drinking tepid water from plastic bottles that had been rolling around under their seats for days.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	girls who light fires

They’ve been on the road for almost a month now, turned into these hot, slick little things.

She’s a pattern of browned skin, criss-crossed with different marks from the three shirts she’d packed, bikini strings, the big floppy hat Finn had bought her when they’d camped out on the beach for the weekend up the coast from home, the one that Julia had always worn when she was out in the yard trimming hedges and tending to her blooming flowers.

Finn looks worn and grizzled – but in a way that suits him, the stubble emphasising the sharp line of his jaw, some kind of old fashioned movie star with his wayfarers perched just so on the bridge of his nose, one wrist draped over the steering wheel, the other arm folded up on top of the rolled down window.

Poe’s truck is a little more the worse for wear. They’ve been living out of it this whole time – it goes without saying that it’s littered with food wrappers, beach towels and the one odd flip flop neither of them have had the foresight (or other inclination) to throw away with all the other junk they occasionally clean out, toting armfuls of it to a gas station trash can, where they can quickly acquire more supplies to replenish the mess.

They’d brought Bébé, when the trip was still raw, but they’d had to backtrack and take her back to Poe’s parents three days in. They’d doubted that he’d appreciate his darling going missing somewhere south of the border. Rey still kind of missed sitting with her feet hanging out of the window, or up on the dash, the little ginger dog curled up in her lap, little pink tongue lolling out across her thigh. She still hangs her feet out of the window anyway, and leans across to turn the stereo up, browses through Finn’s music selection.

(Way too much classic American rock, if you ask her.)

They’ve come across country from Nevada - made a brief (misad)venture into Mexico - and are trundling towards Alabama, where they’ll pick Poe up from his summer job at Space Camp.

The two of them have fallen into the easy, comfortable silence that comes after spending three weeks in close proximity. They’d showered under waterfalls together, shrieked at the temperature of the spray and pushed each other off the rocks into the pool below where it was even colder, smelling of pond water and cheap, fruity shampoo. They’d started out on the Pacific Ocean, streaked with salt, their eyes stinging, their skin cracking. Back when they’d been soft, inexperienced. Used to eating pancakes one of the mom’s had made, fighting over maple syrup, who got to drink the last of the orange juice.

Now they ate gas station hot dogs slathered in ketchup when they were lucky, or otherwise existed solely on stale chips and beef jerky on long stretches of endless sweltering tarmac, drinking tepid water from plastic bottles that had been rolling around under their seats for days.

Something about all this was oddly blissful. If Rey could get away with running from what was waiting for her in the fall - packing up her bedroom in her and Finn’s foster family’s house, moving across the country for college, leaving everyone and everything she’d come to love firmly far behind - she’d jump at the opportunity.

They make their penultimate stop in Dallas. It’s a dot on the map that neither one of them had been particularly interested to stop on, but they’d make the decision back home to be spontaneous, and this is where it had led them, scrounging about in the bottom of their bags for some spare cash to share a cheap hotel room. They decide on one of those trite old movie hotels, three pastel walls around a swimming pool that had seen better days.

Inside the room the walls are slick with condensation. With the travel sized toolbox that she never seems to be without, Rey takes the wall panel of the AC unit down and fiddles around with it until they are shivering in their now too-thin shirts. Finn lounges on the starched striped bed sheets and alternates between watching her (‘you better not break it, sunshine - I’m not cut out for a quick getaway in this heat’), flicking through the weather channels, and scrolling through a ‘what’s happening in Dallas’ site on his phone.

“We should do something tonight,” he says, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.

“Yeah?” Rey asks around the screwdriver in her mouth, “like what?”

“I dunno. Music, bars, drinking? Something.” He shrugs his shoulders, settles on a documentary about freak weather conditions, and continues perusing his phone. “There are some alright looking bars downtown. We’ve got those ID’s from Maz, remember? We should go out with a bang. The last night we’ve got to ourselves before two weeks of being subjected to Poe’s driving,” he shudders, half for comedic effect and half (Rey suspects) seriously.

“Sure,” she agrees, despite herself, “what could go wrong.”

There are a lot of things that could go wrong, but neither of them are much for worrying.

 

 *

 

Maybe she’d drunk too much honey infused Whiskey with those redneck kids round the pool back at the hotel, and then again maybe she’d ordered one too many beers from the dingy bar they’d been in before this one, but the room is spinning and she’s pretty sure it’s not just the heavy bass thumping out of the speakers behind her, or the masses of dancing students under the strobe lights.

The DJ is wearing this dumb fucking mask - she’d caught Finn’s eye as soon as she’d seen him, eyebrows quirked, her nostrils flaring, _daft punk wannabe, much_ \- but he’d just shrugged his shoulders, grinned that stupid all-encompassing smile of his, and she’d had to play along. It would have been bad form not to.

Besides, the music is actually pretty good. It’s easy enough to forget about being self-conscious about gangly limbs and somewhat wild dance moves after so much alcohol, when the air is so electric, when nobody else in the immediate vicinity cares for much except the sick drops and grinding up against whoever is nearest them in the crowd. Someone passes something tightly rolled and smoking across to Rey, and she takes it, presses in between her fingers. She looks around for Finn, but she can’t see him, and maybe this is when she should worry, but she is buzzed as fuck, and he would probably just shrug his shoulders and smile that crooked little smile anyway. So what the hell, she takes a quick drag, and inhales. It’s not like she needed _permission._

She doesn’t expect it to hit the back of her throat so hard. Her lungs fill, expand, and tighten, spasm. She’s coughing madly into her hand as someone impatient wrestles the joint from her fingers. Rey has never been prone to panic, but the lights go dark as the music switches, and she fixes her shoulders, trains her eyes solidly on a glowing exit sign, and escapes.

It’s raining as she falls out of the exit door, stumbling into a group of girls with cigarettes, who laugh and steady her as best they can with their free hands. A chorus of _woah_ ’s and _easy_ ’s follow her, ringing in her ears as she runs up the metal steps, her knuckles white, clenched around the handrail. She sits at the top and heaves in mouthfuls of air, letting it run through her lungs until she can breathe properly again. Well, shit.

She’s soaked to the bone already. She shivers, wipes the rain from her cheekbones, her eyes a blackened smudge. Finn had braided her hair earlier – while she’d sat between his legs and sung quietly along to the music channel on the television, typing out a mutually composed text to Poe who, it was said, was eagerly awaiting their upcoming reunion – but long tendrils of it have come loose, and are stuck like strung jewels to the side of her face.

Standing up, the street whirls and dips and she has to lean back for purchase on the handrail behind her. She’d come out without a bag - typical teenage girl, just stuffed her phone and debit card into her bra, using her self-inflicted poverty as something of a challenge to see how many drinks she’d had to buy for herself (not many, was the outcome).

 _Got kicked out_ , she types, her illuminated face bent solemnly over her phone screen, _let’s meet back at the hotel xo_

Rey is tough, and not prone to panic, but the street is slippery (old cobblestones underfoot and her old sneakers too worn down to find proper purchase) and she is pretty sure that some shadowy demon is following her. Or at least a giant of a man dressed all in black.

There’s a umbrella propped up on the edge of a building, bent out of shape by the storm that must have passed overhead while they were dancing in the basement - the remnants of it whipping her hair into her mouth - and with some old surge of instinct, she reaches out and picks it up.

She watches him carefully out of the corner of her eye, and speeds up a bit. She turns a corner, he follows. She considers running - she is lean and wily and a track star, one hell of a long jumper, but she doesn’t know these streets and logic dictates that she should keep somewhere with streetlights and pedestrians. The latter of which are sadly no-where to be seen, but at least there is a sickly yellow glow for her to see by.

The inevitable panic can’t exactly be helped - she’s already feeling choked.

Methodical footsteps on the cobbles behind her. She slips a little in the rain, and rights herself with pin wheeling arms. For a kid who’d spent most of her life running, she doesn’t have much of a flight instinct.

She slows, lets him come up closer behind her, and inhales heavily, closes her eyes for a second. She can damn well handle herself. When she opens them again she is resolute. She spins, and sucks him straight in the gut with the pointed end of the umbrella. He looms over her this close up, even wheezing, folded over his sternum. He is pale, all of his dark hair drawn back off of his face and in the yellow light she can see -

“What the - Ben?” She is still wielding the umbrella like a weapon. Her arm falls down to her side. The whole long line of him goes tight. She can tell he is trying to pull himself upright, but she’s socked him so hard that she’d pulled a muscle down the side of her back and he is hunched over and breathless. Her makeup is running down her face and she shouldn’t care - she doesn’t, exactly - but she still tucks her hair back behind her ears, wipes a little more at the black smudges underneath her eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“Uh, a gig,” he says, and his voice is like a warning alarm in her ears, “a show. Kylo Ren,” he shoves a thumb back behind him to indicate the club she’d just left, “that’s what people call me now.”

She can barely see his face - it is cast in long, insipid shadows from the streetlights - but if the slow monotone of his voice is anything to go by then she is pretty sure that it’s a mistake to linger. He shoves his hands in his pockets, rocks back on his heels.

“I guess I could ask you the same question,” Rey can hear the lopsided smirk in his voice, “or maybe why you viciously attacked me with an umbrella?”

“Shit - I thought some thug was following me,” she’s ashamed of how paranoid and pathetic she sounds, slurring a little bit as she forces it out from between her teeth: “I suppose I’m sorry. You know - about the umbrella.” He laughs, but the sound is low and apathetic in the very back of his throat.

“Gracious as ever, I see,” he says, and she only frowns in response, crosses her arms over her chest.

The rain has slowed to a steady drizzle and she turns her face up towards the sky - not much of a difference from craning her neck back to try and get a good look at his goddamn face - and listens as he clears his throat. When she looks back, he is worrying at the back of his neck with his free hand, the other hitching his backpack further up his shoulder. If she didn’t know better she might have said he was nervous.

“Hey, look, I’ll walk you ho-”

“You don’t have to do that,” she interjects quickly, her words nearly tumbling over each other in an effort to get out, to be heard, “I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself.”

“Sure, okay, where are you staying?” There is a smug, stubborn tinge in his tone that she does not much appreciate - her stomach turns over and her heart pounds a little harder in her chest, she hates it so fucking much.

‘This disgusting little hotel - pink walls - uptown, somewhere,” burbling, she’s definitely burbling. Not much has changed. Shit, change the subject. She backtracks, wildly, “I thought you were supposed to be in New York?”

Somehow they are walking together, falling into step like it’s a compulsion. Meandering carelessly through the streets with nowhere concrete to go. Both of them staring dead ahead, loathe to let their eyes wander. He knows very well she doesn’t have a clue where she’s going, and she knows that he knows; not that she’ll ever let it show.

Rey can sense, rather than see or hear, his hesitation. She’d been fourteen last time she’d seen him – her aloof language and literature tutor – and she’d been keen to keep in touch while he was at NYU majoring in classic literature, sending him long, rambling text messages about high school and track and Finn and his mother. Except it hadn’t exactly taken her long to realise that responses weren’t just slow in coming – they weren’t coming at all.

“I’ve been in New York,” he says slowly, his voice a long, lazy drawl, “and California, and in London, and Europe,” and she wants to hold up her hand and tell him to hold the hell up – what?

“That’s cool and all,” it’s a bit slurred, still, and she hates the way she can see him tilting his chin down to check on her ( with what - she wants to snort at the thought - concern??) just out the corner of her eye, “but why doesn’t your mother know about it?”

She knows that she’s got that pointed look sprawled all over her face – the one that makes Poe cringe away from her, palms splayed in surrender. That boy would do almost anything to escape a lecture, no matter how well-meant. All that changes with Ben is that she can very clearly see an old, familiar muscle ticking along his clenched jaw. Had she always had that effect?

He can remember looming over her while her arms were full of dog-eared books, her hair all loose and stuck to her chin in the humidity, this fourteen year old kid that inspired this hot, sickly little feeling in his stomach. It hadn’t been hard to ignore her emails, then, when he’d been in New York, his west coast tan seeping away from him just like all the power she’d had, those dark little eyes of hers, burning holes in him.

(It had been hard – he’d lied – but a necessity all the same.)

Ben shrugs his shoulders at her and the apathy of it makes her want to dig her nails into his skin, somewhere, anywhere she could get contact.

“Figured what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

Rey glowers. She’s seething; steam practically pouring out of her ears.

Usually he’s got this strident filter that catches everything, but there’s something about the weight of her eyes and the streetlights off the wet floor that’s got him all loose-tongued, loose-limbed. “Cool it,” he says, almost laughingly, and very casually (very carefully) he drops an arm around her shoulders.

Immediately she’s hunchbacked and tense - he goes to draw away, almost apologetic - but she says: “how the damn tables turn,” and both of them remember a time like this from before, very clearly, when he’d been puce and spitting fire and her arm had snaked around his waist and just that - for once, the shock of it maybe, those weird little thrills in his bones - had been enough to drag his attention away. She laughs, and he allows himself a second to relish in the sound of it.

“Come on, then,” she says, gently, and reaches up to mock-punch him, her knuckles dusting against the side of his neck (he tries not to shiver, and succeeds, mostly) “take me home.”

So he walks her home - or at least back to the hotel she's staying at. He recognises Poe's truck in the parking lot, and hates that he does. They stop right by it, sheltering underneath a balcony beside a whirring vending machine that sells Coca Cola and Marlboro's and Trojan's.

He's staring at her lips. She can see him looking at them. His eyes are all wide and hazy and he looks lost, now it's started raining, drops of water on his cheeks that look like tears. She can't imagine she looks all that great, except the way he's staring at her makes her feel like maybe she'd edible, or something. She's still a little tipsy, so she goes to prod his shin with her toes, and ends up kicking him. He grunts, swears, steps away and leans against the hood of Poe's truck, his arms folded across his chest.

It's a good thing he moved away, she decides. She'd been starting to think that maybe he wanted to kiss her. 

Her phone buzzes against her chest, and she can feel him staring again as she pulls it out of her bra. When she looks up at him, he's still looking, straight at her, dark and broody and very ridiculous, soaked to the bone like that. She wafts her arms in a vague upwards direction.

"I'd invite you up," her voice is stilted, some kind of self-awareness filtered back into it, "but you know... Finn." 

"Your boyfriend?"

There's a sudden nasal quality to his voice that makes her pause. She chews on her lips, crosses her own arms over her chest.

"My best friend," she states, with an air of finality. Ben acquiesces, pushes himself forward, tilts his chin down until she has to crane her upwards to meet his eye. 

She realises - it hits her like a sack of shit, really - that he's never going to kiss her. It would be a terrible mistake, if he did. But, she supposes, letting herself be drawn in closer towards his gravitas, this is the last time she'll ever see him. So she curls a hand in his wet shirt - he exhales, like he'd been punched in the sternum, it sounds so pained - and pulls herself up. She kisses him, long and hard and not very gentle at all. He stands very still, one hand braced on the car behind him, the other hanging loosely at his side. Maybe he'd touch her, if he wasn't so afraid of being burned. Or maybe, if they'd had a little more time -

"REY!" It's horrified, Finn's face, as he hangs over the balcony above them, "what the  _fuck?_ Who is that?"

"Shit," she breathes into the side of Ben's mouth, grinning stupidly as he goggles and the high points of his cheeks flush redder and redder, "I better run before he realises who you are," she releases him, and he stares at the wet wrinkles of his shirt, looking anywhere but at her. And she does just what he'd done, all those years ago - disappears. 

He stands there a long time, by himself.

Eventually he turns around, and wanders out into the rain. He could do with a long walk home.

 

* 

 

Fall rolls around and Rey packs up her bedroom in cardboard boxes and duffel bags and heads to college. She’s wrapped up to the neck, scarf, coat, gloves, hat, fingers wrapped round a cardboard coffee cup – she’s not used to this weather, to the hint of snow already in the air. It’s far too early in the morning to be in the library of all places – but she’s always been an early riser, and she’s got an astronautics project to work on. Besides, it’s much easier to get on with it when Poe isn’t a constant, buzzing presence on her phone, asking how it’s going.

She flips open her laptop, connects to the library wifi, and it's six thirty in the morning (still dark outside) but there's a new email in her inbox. 

 _I guess I owe you a few of these,_ it starts, and she grins, wickedly, from ear to ear.

**Author's Note:**

> prelow - mistakes like these  
> lord huron - she lit a fire  
> st lucia - all eyes on you
> 
> i am trash and i like indie music and reylo. what else is there to say? :)


End file.
